Apple’s Turnover

Illustration by Sirichai

It’s “forbidden,” yet it’s the most widely cultivated fruit of all. You leave them on teacher’s desks, or you eat one to keep the doctor away, and if you’re William Tell you blow it off the top of your son’s head with a well-placed arrow. It helped Isaac Newton discover gravity and it’s printed on the back of your iPod.

It’s been associated with everyone from serpents to witches, from Gwyneth Paltrow to the New York City Chamber of Commerce. And yet, like all great legends, the famed edible apple, or malus domestica, is the product of humble beginnings.

Northwestern China’s Tien Shan mountain range, the “Heavenly Mountains,” has been called the “Eden of Apples.” Researchers pinpoint this location as the birthplace of the apple, which evolved over millennia through a process of natural selection. We can attribute the apple’s present-day ubiquity to greedy humans and hungry animals who traveled the region since Neolithic times, and their bowel movements, which helped spread the fruit’s seed east and west of Eden over the last 10,000 years into the outlying areas of Asia Minor, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Himalayan India, Pakistan, and western China. Evidence shows that apple cultivation started as far back as 20th century B.C. in the Indus Valley and the 18th century B.C. in Mesopotamia.

Rulers, conquerors, and horticulturalists played no small part in promoting the fruit’s popularity. In the 12th and 11th centuries B.C., both Ramses II and Ramses III ordered the planting and cultivation of apples in the Nile Delta, which they then presented as offerings to the god Ra. In the 5th century B.C., Chinese diplomat Feng Li went from government official to apple champion, quitting his day job to graft apple, pear, and peach trees full-time. In the 1st century A.D., the Romans introduced edible apples to Western Europe. From the 1100s until early 1900s, apples were rare delicacies reserved for royalty on the Korean peninsula. In the 1500s, Spanish conquistadors introduced cultivated apples to South America and Mexico. In the 1600s, colonists brought them to North America. In the 1700s, John Chapman, aka “Johnny Appleseed,” planted apple nurseries that flourished throughout the American Midwest, quickly making the apple a staple in the pioneer diet and cementing apple pie as a national dish. In the 21st century, apples have become a multi-billion dollar industry, with China and the United States leading in apple production.

But the ride to superstardom hasn’t always been easy for the apple. From the Middle Ages through the 16th century, apples were seen as the cause of “bad stomachs” and fever among suspicious Western Europeans. During the 1980s, U.S. Apple sales tanked after 60 Minutes reported that Alar, the chemical used to enhance the red color of apples, was carcinogenic. Though the FDA denounced those claims, schools banned apple products from lunch menus. Today, the malus domestica faces more serious problems than bad publicity—namely diseases such as apple scab, cedar apple rust, fire blight, and powdery mildew. The apple’s increasing susceptibility to these scourges has been blamed on a shallow gene pool that offers little disease resistance; scientists estimate some 90% of all grocery store apples are ultimately the offspring of two parent trees.

In the hopes of creating less disease-prone apple species, scientists are turning to where it all started: the primeval forests of the Tien Shan. Despite its role as the apple’s ancestral home, “Eden” has remained uncultivated and isolated from the rest of the world’s apples, unwittingly developing a plethora of disease-resistant apple genes. Geneticists and horticulturists are now working to create hybrids which will produce the desired taste of cultivated apples and the immunity of the wild ones.

Still, even the Tien Shan apples have had to contend with problems of their own. Due to land development, the groves have lost 90 percent of their acreage since the 1940s. Renewed interest in the apple’s birthplace as a valuable scientific resource brings hope to those working to protect the area from further environmental destruction.

Through its long and circuitous road throughout the history of the world, the apple has always bounced back; this time, we’re sure, will be no different.